American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Virtually all the more eminent politicoes in American history, including especially the Presidents, have made contributions to the roster of American political terms and slogans. I have mentioned some of those of Washington and Jefferson. Lincoln is chiefly remembered for his more sonorous phrases, e.g., government of the people, by the people and for the people,1 but he also invented or introduced many more homely things, e.g., yellow dog as a general indicator of inferiority. He was also probably the author of the great masses of the plain people, later worked so hard by Bryan. The heroes between Lincoln and Cleveland were not phrase-makers, but some of them were the beneficiaries or victims of phrases made by others, e.g., plumed knight, applied to Blaine by Robert Ingersoll in 1876,2 and the rum, Romanism and rebellion of the Rev. S. D. Burchard in 1884.3 With the advent of Cleveland came a revival of word and phrase making: he was responsible for innocuous desuetude4 and not a few others, and was falsely credited with “Public office is a public trust.”5 McKinley, who succeeded him, was likewise credited with manifest destiny, but the DAE shows that it had been used so early as 1858 and I have found at least one example even earlier.6 He seems to have actually coined benevolent assimilation: this was in 1898 and he used it to describe the annexation of the Philippines. His followers revived and propagated honest dollar and full dinner-pail, neither of them new. They also called him the advance-agent of prosperity, 1897. Bryan’s masterpiece was cross-of-gold-and-crown-of-thorns, launched at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, July 9, 1896, but he also made many other phrases, including deserving Democrat.1 Theodore Roosevelt made or revived scores, e.g., big stick,2 malefactors of great wealth,3 Ananias Club, preparedness (1915), mollycoddle,4 weasel word,5 nature-faker,6 to pussyfoot,7 strenuous life,8 one hundred percent American, Armageddon, muck-raker,9 square deal,10 and lunatic fringe.11 Woodrow Wilson was also fertile in neologisms; some of his inventions were little group of wilful men, new freedom, peace without victory,12 too proud to fight,13 watchful waiting,14 to make the world safe for democracy, open covenants openly arrived at,15 and pitiless publicity.16 Then came Harding, with normalcy17 followed by Coolidge with “Well, they hired the money,18 didn’t they?” and “I do not choose to run.” Both of these were sound old American terms. The DAE traces to hire, in the sense of to borrow, to 1782, and to choose, in the general sense of to elect, must be quite as old. Al Smith, in the period after Coolidge, introduced baloney (dollar), alphabet soup, off the record,1 and various other pungent terms. Also, during this period, many other publicists made contributions, e.g., Senator George H. Moses of New Hampshire, with sons of the wild jackass to designate the insurgent Republicans of the Western wilds. Hoover will be remembered chiefly, I suppose, for rugged individualism2 and noble experiment,3 the latter of which aroused the implacable dudgeon of the wets and so helped to ruin him. So did Hooverville, which he certainly did not invent.

  With the Depression4 and the New Deal came a great flood of novelties — the greatest since the days of Roosevelt I, e.g., forgotten man,5 economic royalist,6 prince of pelf, horse-and-buggy days, to prime the pump, yardstick, rendezvous with destiny,7 coördinator, directive, ceiling-price, rotten rich, underprivileged, boondoggling,8 more abundant life, court-packing, death-sentence, client (for beneficiary), bottle-neck, isolationist, moral climate1 and good neighbor policy. New Deal was launched in Roosevelt’s speech of acceptance, July 2, 1932. It was apparently an amalgam of the square deal of Roosevelt I and the new freedom of Woodrow Wilson, and is said to have been devised by Samuel I. Rosenman, the candidate’s private counsel and intimate adviser and later a judge of the New York Supreme Court.2 On December 21, 1943 Roosevelt told Delworth Lupton of the Cleveland Press that he had tired of it and hoped it would be abandoned for Win the War or something of the sort,3 but it continued in use. Brain Trust has been ascribed to Dr. James M. Kieran, president of Hunter College, New York, but it was actually invented by another James M. Kieran, a reporter for the New York Times. This was at Hyde Park, N. Y., where Roosevelt was preparing campaign speeches with the aid of three Columbia University professors, Raymond Moley, Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf A. Berle, Jr. When informed at a press conference that they were in residence Kieran exclaimed, “The Brains Trust!”, and soon afterward he used the phrase in a dispatch to the Times.4 He has recorded that he “kept writing it in stories for some time, and some inspired Times copy-reader kept cutting it out before it finally sneaked by and got into actual print.”5 It was then adopted by other reporters, and soon Brains was reduced to the singular, and Louis McHenry Howe, General Hugh S. Johnson, Lewis W. Douglas, Hermann Oliphant, Arthur E. Morgan, Charles W. Taussig and others were added to the original personnel.1 Some of the Roosevelt advisers did not like the term, but Roosevelt himself favored it. Johnson later testified that Brain Trust had been “used by the line of the Army as a sort of sour grapes crack at the first American general staff established by Elihu Root in 1901.”2 The coiner of That Man I do not know. Globaloney was the invention of the Hon. Clare Boothe Luce.3 Many other words and phrases of a derisive sort are in local political use.4

  Prohibition, which raged from 1920 to 1933, brought in a number of terms that threaten to be remembered, e.g., home-brew, law en-forcement, bathtub gin, highjacker (or hijacker), rum-runner and rum-row. Wet is traced by the DAE to 1888 and dry to 1870. To go dry has been found in 1888 and to vote dry in 1904, and both are probably older. Wet-goods goes back to 1779. Bone-dry is not listed by the DAE, but it was probably in use before 1890. Local option is first recorded in 1884. During the thirteen theoretically dry years the wets invented dry-dry to designate a legislator who voted with the Anti-Saloon League and was yet dry personally; such prodigies were not numerous.5 The reds who emerged from hiding on the establishment of the entente cordiale with Russia in 1940 have given us fellow-traveler,1 cell,2 to follow the party line, people’s (or popular) front, to bore from within and transmission belt, have revived and propagated left, left-wing, leftist,3 the corresponding forms of right and center, to indoctrinate,4 underground,5 class struggle,6 reactionary,7 counter-revolutionary,8 proletarian and its derivatives,9 and Trojan horse,10 and have helped to make fascist and bourgeois11 general terms of abuse.12

  Since the earliest days the chief statesmen of the United States have rated eulogistic nicknames, and some of them are familiar to every schoolboy, e.g., the Father of His Country for Washington, Honest Abe for Lincoln, Old Hickory for Jackson, the Little Giant for Stephen A. Douglas, the Great Commoner for Clay, and the Commoner for Bryan. But respectable schoolboys are not informed that Washington, in his lifetime, was often spoken of by his critics as the Stepfather of His Country and the Old Fox. Nor have they heard, unless they live in the darker areas of the South, that the sainted Lincoln, now exalted to a place scarcely below Washington’s in the American hagiology, was derided by Confederates and Northern Democrats alike as the Baboon, a brilliant but indelicate reference to his aspect.1 Grant, because he was always the soldier more than the politician, escaped with nothing worse than the Butcher, but his successors got it hot and heavy. Hayes was the Fraud and Granny. Arthur was the Dude, Cleveland was the Stuffed Prophet and the Hangman,1 Roosevelt I was the Bull Moose, the Man on Horseback and Teddy the Meddler, Wilson was the Phrasemaker and the Schoolmaster, Coolidge was Silent Cal (always with a sneer), and Hoover had nicknames that had better be forgotten. So with many of those who, after years of ardent membership in the Why-not-me? Club, failed of the capital prize. Calhoun was the Great Nullifier, Samuel J. Tilden was Slippery Sam, Webster was Black Dan, Blaine was the Tattooed Man,2 Charles Sumner was the Bull of the Woods, Charles Curtis was the Indian, Charles G. Dawes was Hell and Maria, W. R. Hearst was the Yellow Kid, Charles E. Hughes was the Feather-Duster, and John Nance Garner was Cactus Jack, Poker Face and the Owl.3 Even Mrs. Lincoln had a nickname, to wit, the She-wolf. In every campaign since Jefferson’s first attack upon the Federalists there has been a vast emission of billingsgate,4 and more than one figure in American
politics is remembered for his prodigies of invective, e.g., the two Roosevelts and Wilson. In our own time one of the most gifted and industrious practitioners has been the Hon. Harold L. Ickes. Some of his masterpieces were assembled in 1940 by Fon W. Boardman, Jr.,5 e.g., Trilby for Alfred M. Landon and Svengali for W. R. Hearst, condittieri for the newspaper columnists hostile to the New Deal, jeer leader for one of them, vestal virgins for the members of the unfortunate Liberty League, and intellectual Dillingers6 for other persons he disliked. In return Ickes was given the appellation of Donald Duck by Westbrook Pegler. The late General Hugh S. Johnson was both in and out of the New Deal corral and did some loud howling on both sides of the barbed wire. While he was running the NRA he denounced its Republican critics as intellectual prostitutes, academic mercenaries, kippered herring and hippopotami, and after he became debamboozled he flayed his late colleagues in the salvation of humanity in the same ferocious manner, calling them breast-beaters, wand-waving wizards, janissaries, and Adullamites.1 He is also said to have invented the pungent third termite. The series of nicknames that began with Tommy the Cork for Thomas G. Corcoran is said to have been launched by Mr. Roosevelt himself. Other hands contributed to it, and it presently included Henry the Morgue for Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Leon the Hen for Leon Henderson, Benny the Cone for Benjamin V. Cohen, and Harold the Ick for Ickes. According to Boardman, before cited, Gerald L. K. Smith changed the last to the Itch. Other critics have denominated Ickes the gorilla, the night-striking cobra, and the blunderbuss.2

  3. LOAN-WORDS AND NON-ENGLISH INFLUENCES

  150. [The Indians of the Far West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the Algonquins of the Northeast. Most of the new loan-words that were picked up west of the Mississippi came in either through the Spanish, e.g., coyote, or through the Chinook trade-jargon of the Columbia river region, e.g., cayuse.] Harold W. Bentley, in his excellent “Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English,”3 is content to mark coyote “from American Indian coyotl,” but the DAE and Webster 1934 ascribe it particularly to the Nahuatl language of Mexico, which was spoken, in various dialects, by tribes scattered from Panama to Idaho, and is still the mother-tongue of a large group of Mexican Indians. The DAE’s first example of coyote is from Albert Pike’s “Prose Sketches and Poems,” 1834.4 Pike spelled the word collote, and other early writers spelled it coyotl, koyott and ciote. It designates a prairie wolf, Canis latrans, never encountered in the East, but Western fiction and the movies have made its meaning familiar to all Americans. That cayuse came into American from the Chinook jargon is not certain, though there is a Chinook word, kiuatan, signifying a horse: both Webster 1934 and the DAE prefer to find its origin in the name of a tribe of Oregon Indians. The DAE’s first example is from the Oregon Weekly Times of 1857, which used it in connection with a genuine Chinook word, cultus, meaning inferior. There is a strong tendency to ascribe all otherwise unidentified Indian loans to Chinook, but the actual borrowings of the pioneers seem to have been relatively few. Among them are potlatch, a gift, or, by extension, a party marked by lavish hospitality and gift-giving, traced by the DAE to c. 1861; skookum, large or powerful, traced to 1844; and siwash, a generic term for Indian, borrowed by the Chinook from the French sauvage, and first recorded in American use in 1852. Efforts have been made to derive hooch from the Chinook, but without much success. It apparently comes, in fact, from hoochino (or hoocheno), a name of unknown origin originally applied to a crude fire-water made by the Indians of Alaska.1 On the advent of Prohibition this hoochino began to appear in the Northwestern coast towns, and soon its name was shortened to hooch, which quickly penetrated to all parts of the country.2 Hike has been ascribed to the Chinook hyak, to hurry, but in that sense it did not come into common American use until after Chinook influence had died out.1 The jargon is still spoken more or less by ancients in the Oregon country, both white and Indian, and a number of its terms, unknown elsewhere save in fiction, are familiar locally, e.g., klootchman, a woman; wawa, talk, muckamuck, food; tenas, small; hyas, big; cheechako, a stranger; keekwilly, a house, and kla-how-ya?, how are you?2

  In the same way borrowings from the Indians of the Southwest are current in that region, though not in general use elsewhere, e.g., hogán, an Indian house; mesquite, a shrub; peyote, an intoxicant made of cactus; sapote, a persimmon; pinole, a dish of parched corn, sweetened; tequila or mescal, an intoxicant distilled from agave bulbs; and wickiup, a brush hut, now used to designate any mean habitation. Wickiup is derived by the DAE from an Algonquian language, but all the rest come from the Nahuatl, usually by way of the Spanish. This is true also of a number of words that have got into general circulation in the United States, e.g., chili and tamale. The word Mexico is likewise of Nahuatl origin, as are tomato, cocoa, copal (varnish), chicle (the gum of which chewing-gum is made), chocolate, avocado (pear) and jalap.3 Some of these terms got into English in the days of the early explorations, and are hardly to be classed as Americanisms today, but others had to wait until the great movement into the West began. The DAE traces tamale to 1854, mesquite to 1838, peyote to 1849 and mescal to 1831. There were relatively few additions across the Mississippi to the translated Indian terms (or supposed Indian terms) listed in Chapter III, Section 1. The forest Indians of the East applied father to a friendly white in the Eighteenth Century, but it was not until the reservation Indians of the West began trooping to Washington with their grievances that Great White Father was heard of. Snake-dance is traced by the DAE to 1772, but it remained rare in American use until nearly a century later. Squaw-man is traced to 1866, but is probably older. Happy hunting grounds first appeared in Cooper’s “The Pathfinder,” 1840, and Father of Waters (for the Mississippi) is first recorded in 1812. That all Indians used heap and heap big as general intensives, and how as a greeting, and loosed frequently a grunt represented by ugh was believed firmly by the American boys of my generation, but the evidence is not too impressive.1 The DAE traces how to 1817 and heap to 1850, but does not list ugh. What was supposed to be the universal Indian war-cry was produced in my youth by crying wah as loud as possible, and breaking it into a sort of trill by slapping the open palm against the lips.

  As I have noted in Chapter III, Section 1, direct loans from the Spanish were relatively rare in American speech before 1800, but during the half century following they appeared in large number, and many additions have been made in our own time. Indeed, it is highly probable that American English has borrowed more terms from the Spanish than from any other language. “In some instances,” says Bentley, “words have been adopted because there existed no adequate words in English. More often Spanish elements are taken over for local color effects, for their richness of connotation, including humor, for picturesqueness, or for descriptive contribution of some kind.” He gives siesta as an example of the first class, and savvy and juzgado (corrupted to hoosegow) as examples of the second. Of loans that every American is familiar with the DAE traces adobe to 1821, alfalfa (usually called lucern in England) to 1855, bonanza to 1844, bronco to 1850, burro to 1844, calaboose (taken in by way of Louisiana French) to 1792, canyon (cañon) to 1834, chapparel to 1845, cinch (originally a saddle girth) to 1859, corral to 1839, fiesta to 1844, frijole to 1838,2 hombre to 1846, lariat to 1835, lasso to 1833, mesa to 1844, mosey (from vamose) to 1829, mustang to 1808, padre to 1844, patio to 1827, peon to 1826, placer to 1842, pleza to 1836, pronto to 1850, ranch to 1808, rodeo to 1851, sabe (or savvy) to 1875, señorita to 1823, sierra to 1844, sombrero to 1836, stampede to 1844, tortilla to 1831, and vigilante to 1867. The Mexican War brought in a large number of Spanish terms1 and the California gold rush brought in more. The Spanish-American War did not introduce insurrecto, incommunicado, machete, junta and rurale, but it made all Americans familiar with them. Others filter in more or less steadily. The DAE finds no example of the use of loco before 1883, or of mañana before 1889, or of marihuana before 1894, or of chili con carne before 1895, or of wrangler (
as in horse-wrangler) before 1896, and its first example of rodeo in the sense of a traveling show is dated 1914. Hoosegow, from juzgado, is so recent that the DAE does not list it. As in the case of Indian loans, the vocabulary of Spanish words taken into the everyday speech of the West is very extensive. More than fifty years ago Professor H. Tallichet listed nearly 450 in a series of papers contributed to Dialect Notes,2 and many other observers have added to the record since.3